NRA: Hillary Was Right, You Can't Trust Obama With Your Guns

Associated Press - 10/9/2008 5:15:00 AM

WASHINGTON -- The National Rifle Association is turning to Hillary Clinton to bolster its criticism of Barack Obama's positions on gun issues.

The NRA's Political Victory Fund planned a national newspaper ad Thursday reviving a Clinton mailing that accused Obama of waffling on gun issues. Clinton's campaign sent the mailing when the New York senator was challenging Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. It accuses Obama of changing his statements on gun issues to try to fit the audience he was addressing.

"Hillary was right: You can't trust Obama with your guns," says the NRA political action committee's ad, scheduled to run in USA Today. The PAC has spent at least $2.3 million on anti-Obama efforts, including more than $100,000 on the new USA Today ad.

The NRA ad includes a reproduction of Clinton's mailing, which mentioned Obama's comment at an April fundraiser in San Francisco that some small-town voters bitter about lost jobs "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

"We believe that he's trying to fog the issue and confuse the voter, and he says he's for the Second Amendment while he votes to run the firearms industry and the Second Amendment out of business," Wayne LaPierre, the NRA's executive vice president, said in an interview Wednesday with The Associated Press.

Obama has said people have the right to lawfully bear arms and "there's nothing inconsistent with also saying we can institute some commonsense gun laws so that we don't have kids being shot on the streets of cities like Chicago."

The NRA has not yet endorsed a presidential candidate. LaPierre planned news conferences Thursday in Pennsylvania, Missouri, Colorado and Nevada to make an announcement on the presidential election. He declined Wednesday to reveal which candidate the NRA would endorse but added that the group would "be foolish to overlook the vast areas of agreement" it has with John McCain.

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